


All The Better To See You With

by jonathanharkersfoodblog



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Body Horror, Crying, Gen, Jon grows some new eyes and it’s kinda gross, No beta we die like archival assistants, Self-Mutilation, i still don’t know how to tag, jon has too many eyes, like really really angsty, picking away at skin, set in episode 160
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:15:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25958884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonathanharkersfoodblog/pseuds/jonathanharkersfoodblog
Summary: As Jon desperately tries to stop reading Jonah’s statement, his frantic clawing at his throat grows into a need to scratch away the skin not to stop reading, but to release the thing lurking just beneath it.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 57





	All The Better To See You With

Jon needed to stop reading. He needed to stop speaking. He needed the statement to stop. He needed, he needed, he needed, and yet he could not. His mouth, his lungs, his eyes worked of their own accord, spilling Jonah’s words into the tape recorder, into the world in Jon’s own wretched, smooth, unperturbed voice.

Jon could not rise from where he sat. He was painfully aware in an almost out-of-body sort of way that he could not move. He needed to stop, he needed to stop, he needed to stop, stop, stop. But he couldn’t wrench himself away from the hard wooden chair and the plain wooden table and the neat little file with pages laid out oh-so-nicely before him.

The only thing still under his own control were his hands.

Jon dragged his hands up to his throat, the movement seeming to crack his only functional limbs out of a plaster vice. And he began to scrape. To scratch. To claw. To do anything to stop his voice from speaking words that were not his and that he did not want to spill from his tongue yet continued to be spoken nonetheless. He would drag his nails along his skin and dig through his flesh and open a hole in his throat and tear out his vocal chords out himself if he had to.

He just needed to stop reading.

He carved nail marks across his neck, peeling away that first layer of skin until nothing but the red and raw layer beneath it remained and then he began to maul that, too. The pain was awful. Jon recalled he’d never had a particularly high tolerance for pain despite his recently developed ability to take quite a beating. The recollection, though, seemed distant as stinging, pinching, peeling, searing pain began to rip at his mind alongside the soothing lull of the words that would not end. Jon could feel the tears flowing hot and free down his sunken cheeks.

But he still hadn’t stopped.

As he continued to desperately pick and peel and pinch and drag and claw and maim, he began to do so less and less out of needing to stop reading and more and more so out of needing that skin to be scraped off, to be torn away, to be gone, gone, gone because something needed it gone. Something lurking under his skin begging, itching, pleading, screaming to be set free.

And Jon needed to release it, to release that energy, that burning, aching  need of the thing bubbling under his skin. And finally that release came as Jon plucked away his skin and his neck opened up, a bright, blue-irised eye shining forth from its center.

Jon did not have time to mourn or panic or even think because that itch so recently relieved had spread. It had spread to his face, his arms, his hands, the sides of his neck, his chest, his back. So Jon began to rip, tear, scratch, pull, claw his skin away because he needed the feeling to stop. Stop, stop, stop just as much as the conscious part of him begged, pleaded, sobbed for him to stop reading that  damn statement ! Just as much as what was left of Jonathan Sims the human cried endless, boiling, suffocating tears from the pain that engulfed his whole body as Jonathan Sims the monster tore away skin to reveal eyes of countless colors, shapes and sizes, dragging wretchedly sharp nails down his face, up his shirt and across his chest and back, down his sleeves and through his arms. Scraping away at wherever that horrid, burning need led them.

He was only distantly aware of the blood. The blood that flowed and mingled with his tears, that stained his sweater, that pooled over the table, chair, and floor. Drenched everything but the words Jon knew were nearing their conclusion.

Jon’s hands, finished with their task of opening new eyes from the outside working in, flew to his mouth, obeying the screaming, desperate commands of his mind to stop reading, stop reading, stop, stop,  stop ! He tried to hold his mouth open, to force it shut, to shove his fist inside it, to do  anything to make his voice stop. But he could not.

“You are prepared,” Jon’s voice insisted. “You are ready. You are  marked . The power of the Ceaseless Watcher flows through you and the time of our victory is here.”

Jon could do nothing but continue to cry, silent and horrified.

“Don’t worry, Jon.” He hated Elias. If there was one thing left in the world that he knew it was that he  _hated_ Elias. “You’ll get used to it here, in the world that we have made.” The words sent an icy spear of fear plunging deep into Jon’s gut. “Now.” Jon couldn’t stop the cruel, soft, smirking scoff from rising up out of his throat. “Repeat after me.”

Jon involuntarily stood, his legs working of their own accord, grabbed the final paper of Elias’ message, and walked toward the window. He saw Martin’s minuscule figure ambling along the path away from Daisy’s cottage. Any desperate, futile cry to him died before it even reached Jon’s throat. He began to speak again.

“You who watch and know and understand none. You who listen and hear and will not comprehend. You who wait and wait and drink in all that is not yours by right.”

A wrongness that could not feel more right began to seep through Jon’s blood, into his very bones.

“Come to us in your wholeness. Come to us in your perfection.”

Jon could feel that wrongness begin to wind itself through the air, through reality itself. And Jon was sure that he had never, even in comparison to all he had seen and experienced, felt so afraid in his life. And the worst part was that it wasn’t truly fear at all. It was the disgust and horror that the last dying vestiges of his humanity felt at the dreadful, joyful anticipation that now flowed through the monstrosity he’d become.

“Bring all that is fear and all that is terror and all that is the awful dread that crawls and chokes and blinds and falls and twists and leaves and hides and weaves and burns and hunts and rips and bleeds and  dies !”

Jon couldn’t even feel the tears streaming down his face anymore. Maybe he had stopped crying. Part of him hoped he had not.

“Come to us.”

All he could think was that he was sorry. So, so sorry.

“I OPEN  THE DOOR !”

And the world went black.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry if this wasn’t great or if it was a bit much. In my defense, I was having some Feelings™️ about monster!Jon at 2am and it translated into me writing this.


End file.
